Tuesday, February 17, 2015

One small step for quality sound

On An Overgrown Path was the only independent media source that picked up on the BBC axing their SHOUTcast Radio 3 HD sound stream. Many other individuals expressed concerns on the BBC internet blog and elsewhere, and within the last few hours has come the good news that the BBC have reversed its decision and the SHOUTcast stream has been reinstated. Here is the key section from the BBC statement:

Over the past week or so there has been a lot of feedback and comment over changes to the BBC's internet radio streams. We do need to modernise our infrastructure and we have chosen HTTP chunked delivery formats so that we can continue to innovate and provide new features for our users that the older formats do not support. It is clear from your feedback that our fallback choice for SHOUTcast has fallen short in a number of areas. We genuinely do want to make our streams available to as many people as possible within the budget allowed. We have been working over the past week on some of the technical solutions required to improve the situation and I am happy to say that we have now re-enabled Radio 3 HD Sound on SHOUTcast.

If I was Norman Lebrecht I would claim credit for reversing the BBC's decision. But I am not, so I won't. Credit goes to the Friends of Radio 3, and, particularly, to the huge number of people who care about sound quality and said so on the various technical forums. Back in 2008 I asked does the sound matter anymore? What has happened today at the BBC proves it does.